The Devil and Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey)

by Jason Jack Miller

  "Well," Jamie began. Then, after pausing to get his words in the right order, restarted, "Acquaintance is a better word. I don't know him well enough to ask if he left a wife and kid down here, if that's what you mean."

  "That's what I meant. Sorry about that." I shook my head to show him I knew how stupid it sounded.

  "It's okay. I know it's not easy," he said.

  I felt bad for being so nebby and went back to looking out the window and listening to Jamie's music. Violins and a man who sounded just like a raven when he sang. I tried to tune it out and fall asleep. At some point we turned onto a dirt road. The transition from asphalt to gravel woke me up. After about twenty bumpy minutes Jamie said, "Here we are."

  Keeping my feet out of the mud while loaded down with instrument cases and mic booms was dang-near impossible. Up here in the mountains they had a lot more snow on the ground than we had back in town. All around us pines mingled with naked, gray trees sprinkled with long-dead yellow leaves. A stream of melted snow ran right down the middle of the driveway.

  Jamie said, "I won't be offended if you wait in the car." He took a few steps toward the old house.

  "No, I'm good." I scraped my muddy shoe on a crusty snowdrift, leaving a brown smear.

  "Well, it should be quick and painless. And, May usually bakes. It'll be over before you know it. I wouldn't have even stopped if it wasn't unfinished business. Don't like leaving loose ends. People get older and you keep putting stuff off... These folks won't be around forever." He walked toward the house.

  "When I started most of the people I recorded lived a long ways off the grid." He pointed at his canvas bag with a stub of a pencil. "I'd take this little recorder and I'd run a line out to the car battery if I needed juice. Heard a lot of amazing music. There's not much of that left up here anymore. The grid got a lot bigger."

  I followed his footsteps around the muddiest spots, up the hill to the old house. White curtains, thin like a hospital gown, hung limply behind gray windows. The house was really just a cabin with an addition, neither part built in the last hundred years. The chimney hung off to the side like a bent cigarette. Yellow coal smoke came out.

  Jamie knocked on a thin door covered with only a sniff of paint. A sweet little voice said it'd be right there.

  I stood off to the side while Jamie smiled and gestured with his hat over his heart. The skinny old lady stood there like Joe Pye weed poking up through snow in her rubber boots and thick framed, unironic, Buddy Holly glasses. A quilted flannel shirt hung loosely over a flimsy floral dress and pale apron that had the dirt beaten out of it. Her hair was up in rollers, like after we split her day got even more eventful. She held the door while Jamie went in. I hesitated, and she gave my sleeve a good tug. With a big smile she said, "C'mon now. I hain't paying for to heat the whole county."

  I let her pull me into the small kitchen. The table had a sparkly Formica top like the counters at Murphy's downtown back in the day. There were two wooden, straight-backed chairs and a metal chair with red vinyl padding that had been patched with black electrical tape. She pulled out that chair for me and said, "Jamie, I thought for sure you was going to forget about me. And this young man, it's been such a long time since I seen him."

  Jamie hemmed and hawed with his gear, speaking without looking at the old lady like he didn't want to call attention to her error, "I'm sorry. May, this is a friend of mine. I'm not sure you do know him." He unloaded jars of jam and a few books from his bag and laid them across the table.

  May said, "I feel like I should." She stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, holding me into the chair.

  "Well then, this is Preston Black, he's from town."

  She pulled her hands from my shoulders and took a step back. She wiped her hands in her apron. "Well, I recon I don't know him then."

  I stood up to shake her hand, but she responded weakly, like I owed her money. "You know the song?" I asked.

  "I heard it but I don't know it." She drowned a battered teapot in the stream of spring water that dripped from the spigot. "But that song ain't of no account and you can honor my hospitality by not asking no more about it."

  Jamie watched the whole exchange like a wino waiting for his horse to place so he could get another drink. But when I looked at him for some kind of intervention he just shrugged. So I sat back down feeling a little embarrassed. I didn’t care about the song—just the guy that wrote it. To cover the sting I tried to come up with something clever to text Dani, but ended up just sending out a and watching my phone for a moment, like she'd text right back. I finally put it away and said to Jamie, "Give you a hand?"

  He handed me a boom and pointed to a spot on the floor where he wanted it, then handed me the mic cables. As soon as Jamie hit his recorder's phantom power switch the tea kettle screamed, ruining his sound check. He said, "At least I didn't have headphones on."

  May didn't ask if we wanted cream or sugar. We both got our tea weak with a little honey. May said it was dandelion blossom. I sipped mine while Jamie tuned his fiddle, slid up to the mic and began sawing away. I couldn't take my eyes off his fingers, working the fretboard like a cat works a pillow before she lays down on it.

  When she sang May's voice wasn't even as sweet as the tea. It sounded dry and throaty, like a turkey call, and hard to listen to. Her words curled in, like old movie posters, and her lips didn't move very much.

  During breaks Jamie asked May about cousins and nephews, said he saw old so-and-so down in Elkins and Mary said thanks for the book and she'd call this spring. Since none of it pertained to me I took my phone back out. Somehow none of my texts ever made their way back to me, like fishhooks with no worms. I stood to stretch my legs, drifting over to the sink for a sip of water. The curtains were so thin I could see right into the yard and across the mountains. For a long time I watched the clouds scatter across the aquamarine sky like they were being chased by wolves. I looked for my house, then town, and couldn't find either. The music May and Jamie made didn't seem as bad when it was in the background.

  Above the window I noticed a small square of wood with hand-written letters on it. The top row said SATOR. The next four lines were written so the vertical columns were very straight, letting them be read up and down too. The next row across said AREPO. The next said TENET, then OPERA. The last said ROTAS. I squinted my eyes and looked again.

  SATOR

  AREPO

  TENET

  OPERA

  ROTAS

  I looked at Jamie and pointed to see if he saw it, but he shook his head for me to forget about it. May kept on singing like a sick little bird. She didn't even open her eyes. I stepped across the kitchen and looked into the other room and saw the same square above a window. I didn't need to see the letters to know it said the same thing. I started toward it and Jamie said—stopping me in my tracks—"You might like this next song."

  I almost said, "I'm good" when he motioned for me to have a seat. "Last one," he said.

  May sang a real sad song about a jealous girl who threw her sister into a river. I kind of got lost in the middle part, but the end brought me back. The guy that found her body made a fiddle out of her clavicle and used her finger bones for tuners and strung the bow with her hair. When he played the fiddle it sang the name of the murderer.

  When they finished I said, "Are there any more like that? Like, ones that tell stories and all that?" I buttered a biscuit and slathered some sassafras jelly on it. The butter melted a little from sitting out for so long. The jelly tasted like root beer. I wanted to eat more, but only finished half.

  Jamie wiped his strings down with a chamois. "They all tell a story, don't you think?"

  All of a sudden I was back in English class, not sure if I knew how to answer. "I guess."

  Jamie said, "Or, maybe you liked the little bit of magic at the end? That the narrative had little details like the fur hat and gloves that anchor it in reality. Then when the magic comes you are forced to beli
eve it could really happen because the tone had been believable up to that point." Jamie pulled the biscuits away from me and buttered one for himself. His mustache went up and down when he chewed.

  "Yeah," I said, but inside I felt a little lighter because he had understood exactly what I meant. "Like, how because everything was real, the magic seemed real too."

  Jamie nodded and licked his fingers. I liked Jamie a lot.

  May 'retted up' while me and Jamie talked. My grandma used to 'ret up' the house when we were little, and when she got tired of retting up, me and Pauly had to ret up.

  Jamie had another biscuit then looked at his watch. Time had come for us to ret up too. Jamie had a particular way of coiling his cables and packing everything, so I played roadie and just held stuff for him. On our way out May gave Jamie a big hug. I waited to see if I should shake her hand or whatever, but she just waved at me.

  As soon as May's house disappeared from the rear-view mirror I asked Jamie about those little squares above the windows. Jamie made like he was thinking about it. He said, "Let's see how to put this…"

  Then he took off on a different subject like a hound dog after a rabbit. "No matter how poor you are you always have music. That is, until they find a way to tax it." Then he went on to say how West Virginia was special and he could show me places that had more in common with Switzerland and Germany than with Pittsburgh or Baltimore. He said that there were people up here who not only believed in magic, but practiced it.

  The way he talked about everything besides what I'd asked made me a little tense. I didn't like that he treated me like I just brought home a stray puppy.

  When I stopped nodding my head and responding, he took a deep breath, and finally said, "People up here live on slow time. A good many of them fear the devil and rely on practices handed down from generation to generation to protect themselves from him. I can introduce you to fifteen people today who could give you firsthand accounts of running into the devil up here."

  When I realized he had been answering my question all along, I asked him for a specific or two.

  He said, "The specifics aren't mine to tell."

  I thought about those words for a few miles, and just when I finally figured out exactly what I wanted to ask, he said "You ever come up for the Buckwheat Festival?"

  I looked out the window at Kingwood's old buildings and gas stations and nostalgia took over most of the space in my head. "Yeah. Mom used to bring us up. Buckwheat Fest felt like a minor holiday—not as good as Thanksgiving, but definitely better than Valentine's Day. Mom'd give us a few bucks to play games. Pauly'd come home loaded down with prizes, no lie. Like, he could get the ring around the penknife or the ping-pong ball into the goldfish bowl freaking first try. I never won squat."

  In my head it was 'I never won shit,' but tried to keep my language clean around Jamie. "So I ended up buying fried dough or cotton candy with my money. Always felt bad because Pauly spent his money so fast, so I'd share with him on the way home. Pauly was always win-win. Should've known then I wasn't lucky."

  Jamie laughed, and said, "A while back there was a young writer from down Huntington way. Breece D'J Pancake. Supposed to be the next Hemingway. Praise like that doesn't get bandied about too casually amongst writers."

  "I suppose." I didn't really know.

  "Well, a while after The Atlantic Monthly published his first story, the boy shot himself. Now, you can say what you want, about luck and whatnot—"

  "It's not like his truck stalled at a railroad crossing or he got stampeded by cows. Not sure what luck had to do with it."

  "You're exactly right. But to kill himself two years after he gets his big break... Maybe he'd have been better off staying unpublished. Maybe it was the pressure of success and the high accolades. Either way, he couldn't use the good of his situation to find a reason to go on. Maybe I don't believe in luck, and maybe what I'm trying to say is don't go out of your way to make a good situation bad. Luck or no."

  He held his finger up like there was more coming, then added, "Maybe a more straightforward way to put it is don't go digging up old graves."

  "Sounds like you're trying to talk me out of something." I started drumming my fingers on my knee. "Man, I've been searching for my dad all my life."

  Jamie put his hand over his mouth like the Speak-No-Evil monkey, then returned it to the steering wheel and said, "I don't think that's what I'm saying, son. Maybe it is. But what I mean is, if you're happy with the way things are, whatever happens today shouldn't change it. Don't go making bad luck for yourself, right?"

  "I suppose. And I appreciate you making yourself clear." I took a long look out the window. These mountains made me feel little, like I'd been back in town living with a bigger idea of who I really was. But from up here I could see my whole world in a single view. Like all along I'd really been living too small for my own good, and seeing it all laid out down there just confirmed it.

  I checked my phone for texts. No signal. If Dani called I'd never know it.

  Jamie caught me looking and said, "You'll pick something up a little closer to town."

  "I didn't mean to be rude."

  He laughed. "You're fine. I'm not what you'd call an early adopter, but I like my tech. I'm converting all my old reel-to-reels to digital right now and remastering them. Some of those old tracks sound better than they ever did in my memory."

  For a long time I didn't say anything. I just thought about what I would say to my dad. Like, I wanted to be his friend, especially since he was a musician like me. And I reminded myself a hundred times not to get angry or say something stupid. Just smile and nod. Smile and nod. I reminded myself that I'd been waiting my whole life for today.

  I said, "Pauly used to look out the bedroom window so he could see his dad come up the road on visitation days. Then he'd leave and I'd be all by myself."

  I knew I should've been content to look out the window and keep my mouth shut, but I couldn't. "Back there you talked about Earl Black like you knew something."

  Jamie turned his music down then sighed. "Maybe I do. We'll just have to wait and see."

  I reminded myself I couldn't get angry, no matter what, so I nodded, and said, "It's cool. I probably shouldn't have put you on the spot like that."

  "You have a right, son. You have a right. No need to dish your chances just yet, though." Jamie's voice trailed off and he leaned forward in his seat. With a new smile, he put on his turn signal. "I have to show you something real quick."

  We wound through a thick stand of pines, across a little bridge made out of collapsed corrugated steel pipes and up a really steep hill that made all the instrument cases slide back to the hatch. Jamie stopped the car at the bottom of a big white and gray field with old fence posts poking out every few yards. At the top of the hill stood a barn, and next to it a house. The way the blank windows stared out across the field and down the hill gave me the same feeling you get when you're in the cellar by yourself and you know something else is down there with you.

  Jamie said, "Look up on the barn there." He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes like he had no need to see it for himself.

  "Where?"

  He put his glasses back on and leaned toward me. "The paint's really faded. At the top, just under the eaves."

  "A pentagram?"

  "Technically it's a hex. But that's what you saw at May's today. A sign. For protection. Magic."

  "Magic?"

  "Magic. SATOR Squares have been used for all sorts of purposes—removing jinxes, protecting cattle from witches. This one here didn't work." He pointed at the pentagram on the old barn. "Supposedly a witch lived here. Had a falling out with a cousin. Notorious feud about thirty years ago. Anyway, the cousin got a hold of some hair and used it to curse this woman. Her cattle started giving poisoned milk."

  "Guess the hex didn't work."

  "No, that's why a SATOR Square does." He was about to go on, caught himself then added, "Supposedly."

  "
The words on the SATOR Square are the names of the nails pulled from Christ's body. And palindromes can't be tampered with, not even by the devil himself." Jamie put the car into reverse, but I couldn't turn my back on that place.

  "So they're to keep the devil away? Like an apple a day?" I tried to make a little joke.

  Jamie said, "I guess you could say that."

  "It that something I need to worry about?" I said it with a smile.

  Without looking over, Jamie shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know."

  The thin aluminum walls gleaming in the cold mountain air reminded me I'd traveled a long way from High Street. A sign on the side said, 'DAVIS VFD Enjoy Coca-Cola'. The fire hall's thin walls did little to mask the shrill twine of violins and banjos. The bluebird blue sky didn't carry an ounce of warmth or moisture; I couldn't tell if the mountains I saw were a mile or ten miles away. I followed the music, and Jamie, inside.

  Rows of folding chairs faced an AstroTurf-covered stage that sat beneath a giant bingo flashboard, a ginormous oil painting of Blackwater Falls and an American flag. Student art covered the wall, mostly handprint turkeys and Christmas trees from last year. A small picture of Jay Rockefeller, the governor, not the senator, hung less prominently off to the right, near a snack bar where blue-haired ladies sold Sloppy Joes and hot dogs for a dollar and hot dog sauce—whatever that was—for a buck fifty. If I had to determine where I'd landed based on my surroundings alone, my guess would be somewhere between South Middle School and 1977. I wanted a Sloppy Joe bad.

  The music from the trio on stage sounded like The Chieftains without the flute and drums. A guy with white hair, wearing a camouflage jacket and coal dust-stained ball cap played guitar next to his twin, the only real difference being the mandolin the twin played and the coveralls he wore.